Eat largely of spinage
The twenty-sixth of March is National Spinach Day, a lead-in to talking about one of my favourite vegetables – and that host of others that can bring joy to our tables. Well, ‘joy’ not just in my and Popeye’s opinion but in that of the Methodist founder John Wesley, who recommended ‘Eat largely of spinage,’ meaning ‘lots of’, in his best-selling 1747 self-help medicine manual Primitive Physic, or, an easy and natural method of curing most diseases.
The spinage was to cure ‘the gravel’, kidney stones. We don’t know how many followed his advice, how many asthmatics lived for two weeks on a diet of boiled carrots, or how many optimistic men rubbed onions on their bald patch, morning and evening till it was red, and then slapped honey on.
Many of us nowadays ‘eat largely’ of a range of vegetables, some of which would have been unknown to Wesley. And the number of vegetarians, pescatarians and flexitarians grows yearly, though in the UK it still hovers around 5 per cent of the population, in contrast to India, where 39 per cent describe themselves as ‘vegetarians’.
But historically in British culture, some people, accustomed to vegetables massacred by overcooking, have been less than whelmed by the delight vegetables can afford our taste buds. Think Winston Smith walking into Victory Mansions at the start of Orwell’s 1984: ‘The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats.’ Or Fran Lebovitz’s ‘Vegetables are interesting but lack a sense of purpose unless accompanied by a good cut of meat.’
The word vegetable, from Late Latin and Italian, appeared as an English noun in the late fifteenth century, but it wasn’t until 1727 that it gained its modern sense of food plants. It lacks true synonyms: the dire warning to reluctant children ‘Eat up your greens’ covers only a subset. But other languages run with the key idea of greenness to describe vegetables in general: Italian verdura (from verde, ‘green’), Spanish verdura, ditto, or Danish grøntsag (from grøn, ‘green’).
The local groceries are all out of broccoli, Loccoli
(Roy Blount Jr.)
Though ‘plant-based’ is more than fifty years old, only recently has it achieved wide circulation, especially in supermarket aisles, often as a synonym for ‘vegan’. It’s a good marketing ruse. The word vegetarian, first used in 1824, to my mind comes freighted with a baggage of worthy self-denial (G.B. Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi…) whereas plant-based (1971) encapsulates an idea everyone can relate to. After all, only an ungrateful, nature-hating cur would be averse to plants.
Just as vegetarian is based on Latin – veget(able) + -arian –, so we draw on Latin to subcategorise: you can be a lacto-ovo-vegetarian (milk and eggs and veggies), ovo-, or lacto-. Vegan scoops out the middle of vegetarian like seeds from a ripe melon. Pescatarian/pescetarian combines Italian pesce, ‘fish’, and -tarian; flexitarian is a self-evident portmanteau of flexi(ble) + (vege)tarian.
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‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said
‘To talk of many things:
Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax
Of cabbages—and kings.
And why the sea is boiling hot—
And whether pigs have wings.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’
And talking of cabbages and kings, just as we prefer Latinate regal (Latin regalis) in certain contexts over plain old English kingly or plain Old English cynelic, so gardeners and scientists call cabbages ‘brassicas’, the genus Brassica, from the Latin for ‘cabbage’, a genus which includes broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, kale, turnips and swede. (It’s a genus I’m very partial to: when making cauliflower cheese I must restrain myself from eating too many of those crunchy florets (from French) raw before steaming.)
Conversely, when we plant allium bulbs for a late spring/early summer display, we’re using the Latin for ‘garlic’, which gives its name to the Allium genus and has morphed into the French, Spanish and Italian words for ‘garlic’, ail, ajo and aglio, respectively.
But Latin apart, where do most of our veggie words come from?
Given the preponderance of French-derived vocabulary in English, it’s no surprise so many come from French or Anglo-French, or via French from Latin. These include cabbage, carrot, celery, courgette, lentil, mushroom, onion, rocket, spinach and parsnip.
Some of those have curious backstories. For instance, lentil comes via Old French from the Latin lenticula, ‘lentil’, a diminutive of Latin lens, ‘lens’, based on the pulse’s shape. Rocket comes from the Latin ērūca, which in addition to referring to the plant also, weirdly, meant ‘caterpillar’.
Middle English borrowed Old French moisseron and the spelling varied wildly for centuries before mushroom became standard, influenced by the fact it contained -room, a word shape people could cope with.
Spinach is truly exotic. Cultivation seems to have started in Persia, from where it was exported to China (currently the world’s largest producer), where it is bō cài (菠菜), the ‘Persian vegetable’. The Persian was isfānāj or aspanākh, which the Arabs borrowed as isfānākh. The Moors introduced it to Spain, where it became espinaca. Thence the word and the crop travelled to France as espinach(e) which is one form in which English adopted it. Another form was spinnage and variants ending in –age, as used by Wesley, which is still echoed in the pronunciation /ˈspɪnɪdʒ/ as opposed to /ˈspɪnɪtʃ/.
Two staples of our modern diet are missing: tomatoes and potatoes, plants both from the Americas. Tomato comes via Spanish tomate from tomatl in the Mexican language Nahuatl. The English is a straightforward loanword; what happens in several European languages is much more colourful. The first tomatoes Italians saw wowed them with their yellow hue – like some heritage varieties now – and so they called them ‘golden apples’, pomodori, from pomo ‘apple’ and d’oro, of gold.
Polish and Ukrainian took the Italian word for their pomidor and помiдор (pomidor). Some other Slavic languages calqued their word on the German Paradiesapfel, ‘Paradise apple’, as if it was THAT apple from the Garden of Eden. Maltese goes the whole hog and calls it tadama, ‘Adam’s apple’.
Potato is a sort of historic English misnomer. It’s anglicised from Spanish patata, ‘(white) potato’. Spanish adopted patata from batata, ‘sweet potato’ in Taíno, a Caribbean language (that incidentally also gave us barbecue, canoe, hammock, hurricane, maize and tobacco, among others).
The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) was brought to Europe by Columbus in 1492, and to Britain – Padstow in Cornwall, in fact – by the navigator John Hawkins in 1565. He waxed lyrical: ‘These potatoes be the most delicate rootes that may be eaten, and doe far exceede our passeneps [parsnips] or carets.’
The white potato, Solanum tuberosum, arrived on these shores in 1597, originally dubbed ‘Virginia potatoes’. Over time, ‘Virginia’ dropped out and a word first used for sweet potatoes came to mean the everyday, humdrum variety.
Back at spinach, I was intrigued to learn about Lincolnshire spinach from Jenny Linford’s forthcoming book The Great British Food Tour, a cornucopia of culinary delight. Apparently, the herb Good King Henry (with its fabulous botanical name of Chenopodium bonus-henricus) was cultivated in Lincolnshire as a milder alternative to spinach and has seen something of a revival in recent years.
Before I sign off, as this will be my last-but-one post for the foreseeable, I’d just like to thank any regular readers of these posts for their loyalty, and, of course, the fabulous editorial and marketing team at Collins Dictionaries.
By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.
All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.
